The Moral Foundations of Politics.

• Author: Arnold, N. Scott
• Position: Book Review

By Ian Shapiro

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 289. $25.00 cloth.

As Ian Shapiro makes clear in the preface, his Moral Foundations of Politics grew out a lecture course of the same name that he has been offering at Yale University since the early 1980s. The central question in both the course and the book is, "What kind of government is morally legitimate and why?" Different theories of the sources of political legitimacy in Western political thought from the Enlightenment down to the present are canvassed in the book's six central chapters. The presentation is fair--and fairly standard--though Shapiro has Iris own views on these theories, which he does not attempt to hide.

Chapters 2 and 3 constitute a clear and concise overview of utilitarianism, conceived of as a political philosophy. For classical utilitarianism (that is, Jeremy Bentham's version), government's main purpose is to create a stable framework within which people can pursue their own self-interest. Bentham's apparent attachment to small government, however, never went very deep. Like many nineteenth-century reformers, he had enormous confidence in the power of science, informed by the Principle of Utility, to guide public policy. This attitude would seem to license government intervention potentially in a wide range of human affairs. For example, Shapiro notes that classical utilitarianism, together with the principle of diminishing marginal utility, appears to justify substantial redistribution of wealth. (I say "appears to justify" because in fact it does not. For a clear refutation of this standard utilitarian justification of redistribution, see David Schmidtz, "Diminishing Marginal Utility and Egalitarian Redistribution," Journal of Value Inquiry 34 [spring 2000]: 263-72.) Bentham accepted this idea, although he believed the redistributive impulse had to be tempered by a consideration of the incentive effects of confiscatory tax rates. The modern preoccupation with figuring out the tax rate that will strike the appropriate balance between efficiency and "equity" seems to have its roots here (as does the benevolent-dictator model of government).

Shapiro explains how two standard problems with classical utilitarianism led to important reformulations in the late nineteenth century. One, the problem of interpersonal comparisons of utilities, prompted Vilfredo Pareto to formulate a preference conception of utility in which such comparisons were both...